New England Journal of Public Policy

Volume 27 | Issue 1 Article 3

6-1-2015 South African Solidarity with Palestinians: Motivations, Strategies, and Impact Rajini Srikanth University of Massachusetts Boston, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Srikanth, Rajini (2015) "South African Solidarity with Palestinians: Motivations, Strategies, and Impact," New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 27: Iss. 1, Article 3. Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol27/iss1/3

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South African Solidarity with Palestinians: Motivations, Strategies, and Impact Rajini Srikanth University of Massachusetts Boston

South African support for Palestine received a compelling articulation in 1990 by the late President Nelson Mandela. This article examines a more recent grassroots activism by South Africans for Palestinian self-determination. It discusses the historical legacy of anti-apartheid resistance as well as current economic and political realities within South Africa that have led to the emergence of a robust popular movement for Palestinian rights since 2005. Both South African civil society organizations and the ANC-led government have responded to the 2005 call by Palestinian civil society for a boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against the state of Israel. The article discusses the different motivations of these two groups for participating in the BDS movement, presents the scope of BDS within South Africa, and analyzes its symbolic, economic, and political impact for South Africans and Palestinians, in the near and long term. Finally, it addresses the question of why South Africans consider themselves to be central participants in the Palestinian struggle. ______

On February 6, 2014, members of the South African parliament and a range of civil society organizations attended a conference in Cape Town to declare solidarity with the “oppressed peoples of Palestine, western Sahara, and Cuba.” They issued the Cape Town Declaration of support. With respect to Palestine, the declaration makes fourteen recommendations for action. These include stopping all financial transactions with companies and banks operating in the Israeli settlements of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, mobilizing forces to suspend Israel’s membership in the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, known as SWIFT, the worldwide banking network, and supporting the campaign to free the Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti and other Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons. Furthermore, the declaration calls on all political parties within South Africa to articulate their positions on “the plight of the Palestinian peoples” and to make these positions known before the 2014 national elections in May.1 Sustained organizing on behalf of Palestinian rights has been under way for almost a decade in South Africa, stimulated by the Palestinian civil society’s 2005 call to isolate Israel through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which is modeled on the campaign in the twentieth century to isolate apartheid South Africa. Solidarity with Palestine in South Africa goes back even further than 2005. In 1990, in an interview with Ted Koppel in New York, Nelson Mandela made a strong declaration of support for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s fight for self-determination, and in 1997 he asserted, “We know all too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”2 This article discusses the activism since 2005 within South Africa for the cause of the Palestinians and examines its significance. Activism for Palestine within South Africa is robust, particularly at the grassroots level. On

Rajini Srikanth is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

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August 9, 2014, tens of thousands (estimates range from a low of thirty thousand to a high of two hundred thousand) of protestors marched through the streets of Cape Town decrying Israel’s bombing of Gaza and calling for a severing of South Africa’s diplomatic and trade ties with Israel. This “Day of Rage,” the organizers insisted, was not an exceptional demonstration. Rather, they averred, “We are promoting the line that people need to organize on the ground, and solidarity doesn’t stop when the bombings on Gaza stop. That is a big political point to get across. . . . Our main target now is BDS and pressuring our government to cut ties with Israel.”3 The core of activists in South Africa who organize protests against what they see as Israel’s imperial project in Palestine and its discriminatory policies against Palestinians is pressuring the government, which is led by the African National Congress (ANC), to end all interactions with Israel. These activists are deeply disappointed by what they view as the duplicitous assertions by the government that, on one hand, trumpets its activist stance for Palestinian rights while, on the other, continues to do business with Israel. In the summer of 2014, for instance, President Jacob Zuma declared that “the country was outraged by the ‘continued violence that is claiming scores of lives of civilians in Palestine.’” Two days later, Zuma criticized Hamas, and a spokesperson for the Department of Trade and Industry announced that there were “no plans to impose trade restrictions on Israel amid its conflict with Palestine.”4 Activists consider such statements to be the ANC-led government’s way of having it both ways—of providing a seemingly supportive response to the groundswell of clamor to condemn Israel’s violation of Palestinian rights and sever all ties with Israel while keeping open the avenues of trade that are seen to benefit South Africa economically. Whatever the complications of the ANC’s shifting positions, one thing is clear: the conversation about support for Palestine is robust at the grassroots level and in chambers of political power. This ongoing and public airing of support for the Palestinian peoples marks South Africa as a unique international site in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination and justice. Yet, notwithstanding the visible escalation of solidarity with Palestine, one might ask to what extent such a gesture matters in a material sense. What global impact can one expect from South Africa’s heightened commitment to the Palestinian cause, and, more important, what effect does this solidarity have on the Palestinian peoples? At a fundamental level, South African support offers hope to Palestine. A democratic South Africa stands as the teleological end to a narrative of resistance and international solidarity, the successful culmination of an internal and an external global campaign that yields long-awaited liberation and the opportunity for self-determination. For the Palestinian peoples, the South African case is a model to be emulated; when the people of South Africa actively demonstrate their support, Palestinians feel confirmed in their adoption of the South African paradigm, and they are energized for the protracted campaign in which they realize they must engage. The 2005 Palestinian civil society’s BDS call refers directly to the South African struggle against apartheid: “We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”5 Ali Abunimah, a prominent Palestinian activist and author, asserts that South African solidarity for Palestine though only symbolic is “profoundly” so. Abunimah observes that Nelson Mandela’s death reminded many Palestinians of his clear and unequivocal support for Palestinian self-determination. Furthermore, he adds, the fact that activism for Palestine within South Africa has been predominantly generated and sustained by the people lends it

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New England Journal of Public Policy legitimacy and value.6 (As discussed in a later section, the South African ANC-led government is a latecomer to this campaign.) Although, for now, South African support for Palestine is likely to have no influence on the official US government position, it may have an impact at the grassroots level and among civil society organizations in the United States. Because the anti-apartheid movement in the United States was generated from the ground up, South Africa’s involvement in the Palestinian cause may stimulate the American people to remember their participation in the global struggle for a democratic South Africa and rekindle that spirit in the cause of the Palestinian peoples. One might cautiously claim that ground-level support for Palestine within South Africa (where dozens of civil society and trade union organizations are listed as part of this effort) could catalyze similar ground-level support within the United States.7 Undoubtedly, however, such support would be muscularly thwarted by the many pro-Zionist forces within the United States through their continuing pressure and influence on elected officials at every level of government (as is evidenced by the introduction in state legislatures of bills to withhold state support from public academic institutions that subscribe to boycott measures against Israel).8 In addition, the strong influence of messages disseminated by popular media outlets about anti-Arab sentiment and the “global war on terror” could delay a groundswell of support for Palestine. Public literacy and discussion about the policies of the state of Israel that violate Palestinian rights, however, do seem to be growing in the United States, and increasing numbers of civil society groups are lobbying for divestment from businesses that are involved in helping Israel maintain its occupation of Palestinian land. The campaign directed at the large pension fund TIAA-CREF to drop its investment in companies associated with the Occupation is one example. Among the organizations within the United States that continue to pressure TIAA-CREF is Jewish Voices for Peace.9 Another example is the Block the Boat campaign initiated by pro-Palestinain activists that resulted in an appeal to the members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in California not to unload cargo from the Israeli-owned Zim Integrated Shipping Services vessel in the Port of Oakland. (In 1984 the ILWU Local 10 organized a ten- day strike against apartheid South Africa.) The campaign led to the ship’s being rerouted to Russia.10 Many academic associations in the United States are calling for resolutions and other types of action to boycott Israeli academic institutions for their complicity in the Occupation. The parallels with the South African anti-apartheid movement are being recognized, and the Association for Asian American Studies, the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, and other academic associations are actively encouraging the organization of panels to deepen discussion about the conditions of the Palestinian peoples under Israeli rule.11 For civil society organizations within the United States, the success of the anti-apartheid movement was a victory for grassroots activism over state interests and positions. Anti-apartheid resistance was a transnational movement from which US grassroots organizations drew inspiration and support. A similar influence on US grassroots activism is detectable in the pro- Palestinian movement; within this context, the strong presence of grassroots South African voices is having the effect of preparing US civil society groups for the long struggle that might very well result in a positive outcome for Palestinians. This symbolic support, however, has a potential economic impact as many of these civil society groups push for divestment from

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New England Journal of Public Policy companies supporting the Occupation and thwart business collaborations between local and state companies within the United States and companies within Israel. In the light of these developments, how accurate is it to say that Palestinians have arrived at, in the words of Omar Barghouti, a “South Africa moment”?12 From one perspective, it is a valid observation: various civic, trade union, academic, and other professional organizations in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Norway, South Africa, United States, Wales, and other countries have heeded the call by Palestinian civil society to recognize the dispossession of the Palestinian peoples and have adopted economic and cultural boycotts against the state of Israel. But this “South Africa moment” is only a partial realization of a comprehensive set of demands by the Palestinians. They still cannot claim that they will be able to direct their own destiny rather than reacting to plans formulated by Israel and the United States. They still cannot hope to travel within Palestine and Israel and elsewhere in the world without the anxious anticipation of waiting for permission to do so. They still cannot walk the West Bank and Jerusalem fully savoring the land and its contours, remembering the stories of their grandmothers and grandfathers about the meaning of place. The South Africa moment for Palestine thus seems to be high on symbolism but empty of particulars—those daunting particulars that Noura Erakat lists: Questions about return, repatriation, forced migration, past and present, among Jews and Palestinians throughout the Middle East, and questions of national homeland—of future immigration policies, the prospects of bi-nationalism, competing claims to property, and this is to say nothing of restitution and redress for all the suffering wrong upon occupied lands and their populations.13 Nonetheless, Palestine’s “South Africa moment” is not a futile formulation.

Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and author, calls himself a “samadin,” one who endures, from the Arabic word sumud, “to endure.” He stays in Palestine, despite the many constrictions on his life, because, he says, to leave would be to give the Israelis what they want, that is, to empty the land of Palestinians.14 Shehadeh marks his presence on the land and records his love for it by walking—a sacred almost ritualistic perambulation of the landscape— through which he grounds himself in his people’s history and reconnects with the source of their strength. In his memoir Palestinian Walks, Shehadeh declares: Ever since I learned of the plans to transform our hills being prepared by successive Israeli governments, who supported the policy of establishing settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I have felt like one who is told that he has contracted a terminal disease. Now when I walk in the hills I cannot but be conscious that the time when I will be able to do so is running out. Perhaps the malignancy that has afflicted the hills has heightened my experience of walking in them and discouraged me from ever taking them for granted. Shehadeh uses the word “sarha” to characterize his walks. “To go on a sarha [is] to roam freely, at will, without constraint. . . . A man going on a sarha wanders aimlessly, not restricted by time and place, going where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself.”15 This desire to go on a sarha to feed one’s soul and gather strength can at present be nothing more than an idyllic yearning continuously deferred, ever receding into a bleak future. But perhaps a South African moment could change all that. A South African moment is a moment of possibility, an opening up of political space for Palestinians to contemplate and implement

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New England Journal of Public Policy unfettered their right to self-determination and to choreograph their future: Two states? One state? The nature of the relationship with the erstwhile colonial settlers? Bi-national secular democracy? Economic structure? Trade? Industry? The phrase “South Africa moment,” therefore, is a convenient short-hand signifier for the creation of this new political, ethical, and emotional space in which it is possible to aspire to Palestinian self-determination and criticize Israel for its relentless assault on Palestinian rights. (David Lloyd has a tongue-in-cheek explanation for how this solidarity with Palestine will be viewed twenty years from now: he recalls that in the days of the anti-apartheid struggle, only about eighty of the many hundreds of University of California Berkeley faculty came out to assert their solidarity for the oppressed peoples of South Africa; yet today every one of the faculty “remembers” his or her anti-apartheid activism. Lloyd speculates that such a phenomenon will occur with Palestine: twenty years from now people will declare that they were indeed an active part of the pro-Palestinian struggle, even if today they are cautious and do not take this position. It is as though they can say of themselves with self-congratulatory approval, “We will have participated.”)16 The South Africa moment is many things: a declaration of solidarity by the international community with the Palestinian peoples, confirming that their call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel has been heard and will generate a response; a reminder to the South African leadership and public that they must return the favor that was bestowed on them during the apartheid years, that it is time they took up the cause of the Palestinians and invigorated the discourse around economic and cultural boycotts of Israel. It is time, as they have been reminded and have reminded themselves, they contributed to the swelling voices that “normalize” criticism of Israeli policies that disenfranchise Palestinians of their basic humanity and dignity.17 The benefits of pro-Palestinian activism by South Africans do not accrue only to the Palestinians. The South Africa moment is also a moment for South Africans to be returned to their own sense of civic power and citizenship, to be restored to the robustness of their prior activism, and to burnish the luster of their stated ideals of a multiracial democracy. It is as much a Palestine moment for South Africa as it is a South Africa moment for Palestine. Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, a PhD student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and a young South African man (born in 1985), observes: Palestine has a strong a way of reminding me of the past. When I hear the narrative, it literally involves remembering in the most powerful way. It casts light on our own history. It has renewed my sense of commitment, rejuvenated my relation to my own country. Things in 2011 are literally like the end of the 1980s. Some are disappointed that things have not gone right. It [helps] me to make my country better. . . . Part of the ways to remember the international solidarity we received, is to get involved in Palestine solidarity work. There is a great deal of political development we can get from being active on Palestine for our own political development. It can revive a sense of political commitment, engagement in the service of our own people. Palestine solidarity has the potential, because of the similarities, to inspire us to deal with our past. The solidarity work may reinvigorate our commitment to justice, casting this light in ways that possibly very little in the country can.18 Echoing this sentiment, Zukiswa Qezo, a member of Social Justice Coalition, a civic organization that agitates for basic hygienic and sanitary conditions in the South African townships, observes that living in the townships in South Africa is like living in the Palestinian

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New England Journal of Public Policy refugee camps. After attending a reading by the Palestinian American poet Rami Kanazi on September 24, 2013 in the township of Khayelitsha, near Cape Town, Qezo told a reporter that Kanazi’s poetry showed her a “different perspective on Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian Territories.” She added, “He also explained the issue of Palestinian refugee camps and what is like for Palestinian refugees who have to live in them. From what he told me, it seems that they experience similar living conditions to us in Khayelitsha.”19 As these words suggest, support for Palestinian rights provides South Africans with a clear link between local and global activism.

Network of Activism for Palestine Activism for Palestinian rights comprises a vast and complex network of organizations within South Africa. Since these initiatives are of relatively recent provenance (since 2005), much of the organizing takes place through online media, including social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The activities of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) in 2014 (March 10–March 16), an annual event that is held in different parts of the world to draw attention to the apartheid practices of the state of Israel, were co-sponsored in South Africa by nearly seventy organizations of varying sizes. IAW, like BDS, which the co-sponsors also support, is an international movement that foregrounds the Israeli state’s “oppression” of Palestinians, encourages corporations to divest from business opportunities in Israel, and persuades individuals and institutions to refuse to participate in cultural and academic collaborations with institutions in Israel that are complicit in the Occupation. See Table 1 for a list of the IAW 2014 co-sponsors.

Table 1. Co-sponsors of the 2014 Israeli Apartheid Week in South Africa Organization Abbreviation African National Congress ANC African National Congress Women’s League ANC WL Ahlul Bayat Youth Movement of South Africa ABYMOSA Amandla Botswana National Front BNF Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel in South BDS South Africa Africa Caring Women’s Forum CWF Centre for Civil Society CCS Chemical Energy Paper Printing Wood and Allied Workers CEPPWAWU Union Coalition for a Free Palestine CFP Communication Workers Union CWU Congress of South African Students COSAS Congress of South African Trade Unions COSATU Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa DENOSA Embassy of Palestine in South Africa Food and Allied Workers Union FAWU Friends of Cuba Society FOCUS Islamic Medical Association of South Africa IMA Jamiatul Ulama of South Africa

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Kairos South Africa Media Review Network MRN Mkhonto WeSizwe Military Veterans Association MKMVA Muslim Judicial Council MJC Muslim Lawyers Association MLA Muslim Professional Network MPN Muslim Youth Movement MYM National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union NEHAWU National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa NUMSA National Union of Mineworkers NUM Newcastle Sports Association NCSA Open Shuhada Street OSS Palestine Solidarity Alliance PSA Palestine Solidarity Alliance of Port Elizabeth PSA PE Palestine Solidarity Alliance Port Shepstone Palestine Solidarity Council PSC People Against Suffering Oppression and Poverty PASSOP Pietermaritzburg For Palestine PMB4PALESTINE Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union POPCRU Rhodes University Palestine Solidarity Forum Rhodes PSF Runners for the Freedom of Palestine Rustenburg Palestine Solidarity Forum Rustenburg PSF South African Artists Against Apartheid SAAAA South African Commercial, Catering, and Allied Workers SACCAWU Union South African Communist Party SACP South African Council of Churches SACC South African Council of Churches Youth Forum SACCYF South African Democratic Teachers Union SADTU South African National Defence Union SANDU South African National Muslim Women’s Forum SANMWF South African Students Congress SASCO South African Union of Students SAUS Stellenbosch Palestine Solidarity Campaign Stellenbosch PSC Stop The Jewish National Fund StopTheJNF Swaziland Solidarity Network SSN UKZN Theology and Development Programme UKZN-T&D Union of Muslim Students Association MSA University of Cape Town Palestine Solidarity Forum UCT PSF University of Johannesburg Palestine Solidarity Forum UJ PSF University of Western Cape Palestine Solidarity UWC PSA Association Vaal Muslim Women’s Forum Wits University Palestine Solidarity Forum Wits PSF Workers World Media Productions WWMP

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World Federation of Trade Unions WFTU Young Communist League of South Africa YCL Zaytoun South Africa Source: Facebook page of Israeli Apartheid Week 2014, posted March 8, 2014; https://www.facebook.com/notes/596949407050150/.

Since the Palestine Solidarity Association is itself an alliance of several smaller civil society entities, the count of supporting organizations is higher than what is shown here. Universities whose representatives constitute the IAW South Africa team include Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, North West University, Rhodes University, Stellenbosch University, the University of Cape Town, the University of Johannesburg, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban), the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg), the University of Pretoria, the University of the Western Cape, the University of the Witwatersrand, and Vaal University of Technology.20 South African student groups from these universities also actively support Palestinian rights. In 2011, student activists at the University of Johannesburg issued an impassioned statement protesting the “propaganda” and visit by Israeli officials on a mission to improve the image of Israel. Don’t patronize us! We lived apartheid, we suffered apartheid, we know what apartheid is, we recognise apartheid when we see it. And when we see Israel, we see a regime that practices apartheid. Israel’s image needs no changing; its policies do! We urge Israeli students to instead join the growing and inspiring internal resistance to their regime, particularly the boycott from within movement, rather than waste time and money on these propaganda trips.21 Among the large, internationally known South African trade organizations in this effort is the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), a workers’ union of nearly two million members. Also active in the South African anti-apartheid resistance is the South African Council of Churches (SACC), an interdenominational collective of twenty-seven member churches. COSATU formed an alliance with the ANC and the South African Communist Party for a free and democratic South Africa.22 One should also keep in mind that the South African Jewish community has a complex and mixed record of participation in the anti-apartheid struggle;23 many from this community are involved in the BDS campaign and pro-Palestinian activism. BDS campaigners who are heavily involved in South Africa’s Israeli Apartheid Week explain that they and other South Africans support the people of Palestine because during the 1980s, “people of the world mobilized in their hundreds of thousands—if not millions,” holding “protests, music concerts, free Nelson Mandela events, lectures, film screenings and a host of other events to raise awareness of Apartheid South Africa’s racist policies and to build support for the successful boycott, divestment and sanctions against South Africa campaign.” Today, they see “the opportunity to ‘give-back’ by joining the international movement in solidarity with the indigenous Palestinian people (and their progressive Israeli allies).”24 The campaign and activist blog Writing Rights, an “arm” of the Centre for Law and Social Justice, has published a similar declaration. The group emphasizes its domestic concerns first, noting that its “political activism is based on community struggles for safety and security, equal education, health and HIV, opposing hate crimes and promoting LGBTI [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex] equality.” This activism “promotes critical analysis of the government,

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New England Journal of Public Policy political parties, corporations and other agencies in South Africa.” The campaign goes on to declare its international intentions: Writing Rights and the CLSJ [Centre for Law and Social Justice] supports the struggle of the Palestinian people for an independent, sovereign state based on freedom, equality and dignity for all people. . . . We also support targeted academic and cultural boycotts against those who support the Occupation and Apartheid in Israel by refusing to condemn its war crimes and crimes against humanity. . . . We expose and vigorously counter anti-semitism and Islamophobia.25 The “Resources” page of Writing Rights lists three documents—the 2005 Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel; the 1986 African Charter of Human and People’s Rights; and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations. The African Charter makes a direct reference to colonialism and Zionism, stating its goal “to eliminate colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, zionism and to dismantle aggressive foreign military bases and all forms of discrimination, language, religion or political opinions.”26 Many of South Africa’s pro-Palestinian organizations belong to the Palestine Solidarity Alliance, which “supports the struggle for a free, non-racial and democratic Palestine State for all who live in it.” The alliance lists as the sources of its inspiration the South African National Democratic Revolution and the International Anti-Apartheid Movement.27 In February 2012, during the Eighth Annual IAW events, the SACC issued a letter to all the churches in South Africa calling on them to support the Palestinians in their fight against Israel. Like COSATU, ANC, and SACP, the SACC participated in the anti-apartheid movement, and today it continues its advocacy of the poor of South Africa and disenfranchised peoples elsewhere. In its letter the SACC proclaims, “Our brothers and sisters in Palestine have made a call . . . that we should question what kind of regime Israel is. And to this, after many debates and exchanges, the answer is that it shared and continues to share a similarity with the old South Africa in implementing apartheid where all non-Jews of Palestine are discriminated against, displaced of their land and homes, and subjected to refugee camps and a permanent state of violent military rule.”28 Reminding their member churches that during the apartheid years, Israel was the only state to continue its support of the oppressive government, the SACC calls on its member churches to come to the aid of their Palestinian brothers and sisters and deliver them to freedom and self-determination. In its tone and language, the letter is an exhortation. The ANC, the party that was at the forefront of the anti-apartheid resistance movement, came to the support of the BDS movement later than many of the newer grassroots organizations in South Africa. In October 2012, at the ANC’s Third International Solidarity conference, a group of more than 150 international anti-apartheid activists presented a statement to the ANC, calling on the party “to support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) as expression of the party’s solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people to enjoy their rights.”29 The signatories include E. S. Reddy, director of the former United Nations Centre Against Apartheid; the writers Alice Walker and Vittoria Brittain; Mirielle Fanon, daughter of the postcolonial writer Frantz Fanon (who was from Martinique) and president of the Fanon Center; and other noteworthy activists from outside South Africa. They reminded the ANC of the international support it had received in the long years of anti-apartheid struggle and the efforts on its behalf that the international community had mobilized to engineer economic, sports, and cultural boycotts of the apartheid regime, as well as campaigns to divest from South Africa, all

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New England Journal of Public Policy toward the goal of isolating the South African government and removing it from the mainstream global community. The statement’s reminder to the ANC of its activist roots and its debt to the international community seems essential today because of the frustrations South Africans of all races have been expressing about the ANC. Critics of the ANC complain of cronyism and corruption within the ANC and its neglect of the masses who had placed such hope in the party’s leadership. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has been highly critical of many of the decisions of the ANC and has accused its leaders of having lost their moral vision.30 Other ANC members who were stalwart supporters during the anti-apartheid resistance movement speak openly of their disappointment with the ANC, particularly in its response to the needs of the poor South African.31 There is a new elite in South Africa, they say, and it is the ANC elite, which has realized significant material gains since 1994. In the light of these criticisms, one might argue that when the ANC leaders declare their solidarity with the Palestinians, they are trying to recapture their original idealism and reclaim moral authority for themselves and their party. Such a view is hard to challenge, but foregrounding the ANC’s disingenuous support for Palestine obscures the range of organizations that support the BDS movement, and the relentless pressure that many of these organizations place on their own government and official institutions to address the extreme economic and other social and health problems within South Africa. The international and global vision of these pro-Palestinian organizations does not come at the cost of their domestic and internal focus; in fact, the mission statements of many of these organizations expressly combine the two. Recall Mbuyiseni Ndlozi’s eloquent statement that the struggle for Palestine invigorates other South Africans of his generation to demand social and economic justice from their own government and reanimates their journey toward the vision articulated at the moment of liberation in 1994.

Practical Implications of BDS Action in South Africa Among all sectors of society in South Africa, activism for Palestine solidarity is thriving. Donald Culverson, in an analysis of anti-apartheid activism in the United States from 1969 to 1986, observes that the activists were a “conscience constituency” who did not at the outset imagine that they would derive any material benefits from protesting apartheid and the US government’s refusal to sever ties with South Africa’s apartheid regime. As the anti-apartheid movement gained strength, however, and they realized that their activism was helping to change public opinion, they also saw that it was influencing policymaking in the United States.32 One could argue that their activism helped reveal to them the essence of a participatory democracy, particularly because the majority of those involved in the movement did not come from either the socially elite or the isolated and disenfranchised communities. Rather, they represented a large swath of ordinary men and women. A similar situation prevails in South Africa in its involvement in the global Palestine solidarity movement. South African citizens exercise their rights as democratic citizens and remain committed to ensuring that their relatively new democracy responds to the demands of the people; their demands encompass domestic and international issues. In practical terms, what does support for Palestine and boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel mean? One example is the campaign against two manufacturers from Israel: Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories, which manufactures cosmetics, and Sodastream, which manufacturers home carbonation systems that can turn water into flavored carbonated drinks. The South

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African organization Open Shuhada Street (OSS) protests the “deceptive” “Made in Israel” labeling of these goods. International activists want retailers to remove these products from their stores because they are manufactured in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. OSS activists took up the Ahava and Sodastream campaigns and targeted South African retailers to withdraw these products. As a result, they came under fierce attack from the South African Zionist Federation, which accused OSS board members of corruption and malfeasance. OSS’s spirited response to the accusation, in the form of a letter, takes on the federation for the vitriol of its assault and the inaccuracies of its data. Using official Israeli records, OSS points out the large percentage of holdings in Ahava of the Mitzpe Shalem settlement and accuses the South African Zionist Federation of supporting oppression and colonialism.33 OSS “aims to raise awareness about the lack of freedom of movement in Hebron in the West Bank, and how this reflects some of the worst manifestations of the ongoing Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territories.” The organization was started after a trip to Hebron in the West Bank by some prominent individuals. It is direct in its articulation of the asymmetry of power in the Israeli-Palestinian situation: “We recognise that it is Palestinians whose civil rights have been abrogated most, particularly in the West Bank and Gaza.” Finally, OSS makes the direct connection between activism for apartheid and activism for Palestine: “OSS’ campaigns adopt the strategies used to end South African apartheid.”34 In February 2009, workers of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, who are members of COSATU, refused to unload goods from Israel at the docks in Durban. They were steadfast in their refusal despite pressure from management. Their action is part of a tradition of protesting what they perceive to be injustice. In 2008, they refused to unload a shipment of arms from China that was destined for the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.35 In 2011, the University of Johannesburg canceled its collaborations with Ben-Gurion University in Israel, making it “the first academic institution internationally to cut ties with an Israeli institution formally.”36 BDS activists note that Ben-Gurion University has close ties with the Israeli military and facilitates Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Following the severing of ties between the two universities, Ben-Gurion University withdrew its water- purification technology that the University of Johannesburg used in its water purification projects. The issue of academic boycott has generated vigorous debate among academics and activists. Two publications by the American Association of University Professors, Academe and the Journal of Academic Freedom, have devoted issues to a discussion of academic boycott as a tactic of political resistance and mobilization. An article in the Academe issue published in 2006 presents three perspectives. Jonathan Hyslop, deputy director of the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand, concludes that his “selective support” of academic boycott during the 1980s may not have been an effective strategy because it did little to change Afrikaners’ views of apartheid. Salim Vally, a senior researcher at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg, and Shireen Hassim, a professor of political science at the University of Witwatersrand, disagree with Hyslop. Vally argues that academic institutions are the “prime knowledge producers for the state and its bureaucracy” and, therefore, are instrumental in how the state articulates its policies. Though the academic boycott affected all South African universities, including those that were not sympathetic to the apartheid government, the more “liberal” institutions understood the importance of the boycott because they realized that their criticism of the state could be only

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New England Journal of Public Policy limited. Vally sees a parallel in the current situation in Israel and its academic institutions. He explains: The Israeli university is not that much different from what the South African one was. Israeli universities and a number of individual Israeli academics play key roles in providing the intellectual support for the Israeli state and its endeavors. Certain Israeli universities have very strong links to the military establishment, particularly through their provision of postgraduate degrees to the military. A number of Israeli academics provide the practical and ideological support necessary for the maintenance of the occupation and even for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, extrajudicial killings, racial segregation, and land expropriation.37

Literacy: About Occupation and Palestine (Echoes of Treatment Literacy) Notwithstanding South Africa’s monumental domestic problems, hardly surprising in a new democracy, South Africans from diverse socioeconomic strata believe that they are more than just citizens of their country: they are global citizens. They believe that they owe the world a debt for the support they received from the international community in making a pariah state of the apartheid regime, and they feel that they can offer the world some crucial insights. One of the perspectives they are proclaiming is that the experience of living under Israeli Occupation is akin to apartheid; their confidence in making this assertion comes from their belief that they have experienced apartheid and can therefore recognize it when they see it. Some South African activists even describe the restrictions faced by the Palestinians as “worse than” apartheid.38 Prominent South Africans have made trips to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and returned to make statements about their surprise at the extent of the disenfranchisements endured by the Palestinian peoples. Underlying the Palestine solidarity efforts in South Africa is the belief that once people know the extent to which the policies of the Israeli state violate the rights of the Palestinian peoples, there will be no question in the minds of South Africans that these policies are unjust and must be resisted and challenged. One might say that the approach by many of these activist organizations is to galvanize their constituencies by providing them verifiable data on the oppression of Palestinians. Theirs is a move to counter the “Israelification” of knowledge by supplying facts that currently are not readily available to the common public.39 Highlighting the importance of ensuring access to information, or constructing a full landscape of knowledge, in the fight for justice, Robin Kelley and Erica Williams observe that during the anti-apartheid struggle, “the role of the boycott movement wasn’t just economic or even primarily economic—it was educational.” “The public campaigns,” they point out, “made the world aware of the brutal character of apartheid, challenging South African’s white minority representation of itself as an enlightened democracy.” They quote a white faculty member at the University of Johannesburg, who said: Academic associations (some more than others) examined the nature and conditions of research in their disciplines, and faculty unions became part of broader struggles for justice rather than bodies protecting narrow professional interests. Universities became sites of intense debate, and, indeed, intellectuals became critically involved in debates about the nature of current and future South African societies. In the wake of the boycott, there was not a curtailing of academic freedom, then, but a flourishing of intellectual thought that was rich,

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varied, and exciting.40 Kelley and Williams’s essay, written in remembrance of Nelson Mandela and during the discussions among American Studies Association’s scholars on the effectiveness of an academic boycott of Israel, makes the case for academic boycott and highlights the links between Mandela and Palestine. As they and many other American studies scholars have been arguing, academic boycott ends the monopoly on knowledge that is held by the group in power. It exposes the mechanisms of censorship and misinformation employed by the dominant group in its construction of a distorted landscape of knowledge where the violations of the rights of the oppressed group are eclipsed and their dignity as human beings diminished. Ndifuna Ukwazi is a relatively new activist organization in South Africa whose name is the Xhosa phrase for “I want to know.” The founders use the slightly altered translation “Dare to Know” for the organization’s name in English. One of the founders, Zackie Achmat, an internationally renowned AIDS activist, writes: “Ndifuna Ukwazi . . . is more than a slogan of the Enlightenment. Our everyday struggle for political, social and economic freedom and equality must be based on principle, evidence, desire to know and action. The desire to know requires courage, patience and persistence because freedom, dignity and equality depend on it.”41 In a country that for nearly fifty years (1948–94) experienced the horrors of the regime of apartheid; heard for nearly two years (1996–98), through the public disclosures of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, details of the unimaginable violence that was perpetrated during the apartheid years, and then found itself assaulted by the AIDS epidemic and a president (Thabo Mbeki) who steadfastly denied that the HIV virus causes AIDS, knowledge is considered a crucial and essential precondition for change and informed ethical action. Ndifuna Ukwazi announces in its mission statement that it is an evidenced-based activist organization. This emphasis on supportable claims, on witnessed fact and researchable data that can be adduced to buttress activist positions and allegiance to particular causes, is a cornerstone of the organization’s approach. Worth noting in this context are the statements by Achmat and another member of the board of directors, Doron Isaacs, of their support for Palestinian rights and their evidenced-backed position that the practices of the state of Israel do constitute apartheid. The many activist efforts—by Ndifuna Ukwazi, the Centre for Law and Social Justice, and OSS—share founders and membership in what can sometimes seem to be an ever-expanding network of the tentacles of advocacy confronting on multiple fronts the power of governmental and global institutions. In 1998, Achmat founded the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a grassroots organization on the forefront of AIDS activism. Though he was HIV-infected and needed medications, Achmat decided in 1999 that he would refuse medications and not seek “treatment until all ordinary South Africans can get it on the public-health system.” Because his compelling action brought sustained attention to the medical plight of the poor and to the government’s failure in responding to the HIV crisis of the country, he has been described as “the most important dissident in the country since Nelson Mandela.”42 The activist principles that animated the work of TAC have become legendary in South Africa, even among its critics. TAC and Achmat were jointly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. One aspect of TAC’s very effective cluster of practices—treatment literacy—illuminates how global or international citizenship is evoked and enacted among South Africans. Treatment literacy was a grassroots campaign in which HIV-infected and HIV-affected individuals were educated in a cascading tiered approach. People who lived with the virus were given the scientific facts and the language with which to increase their knowledge and the knowledge of

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New England Journal of Public Policy members of their community. In the hands of people living with HIV in South Africa, treatment literacy became a powerful mobilizing force. They learned the biology of AIDS, the impact of the medications on their bodies, the research that must take place to develop ever more effective drugs, the economic networks that maintain the high price of antiretrovirals, and the responsibilities of their government for upholding their constitutional right to health care. What is noteworthy about treatment literacy is that though it was introduced to address a very specific problem—the government’s negligence in responding to the AIDS epidemic and its failure to fulfill its constitutional healthcare obligations to its people—it was part of a wide agenda to cultivate an informed and empowered citizenship.43 Treatment literacy has its parallel in Palestine literacy and Occupation literacy. Ndifuna Ukwazi’s knowledge-building arm, Ground Up, is the public arena in which debates are conducted in a manner that involves the exchange of knowledge and evidence and where opinions have to be buttressed by verifiable facts. It is a site for community journalism. The vast number of stories and issues that Ground Up covers focus on life in the townships and the seemingly insurmountable challenges of hygiene and safety. But Ground Up, like its umbrella organization, Ndifuna Ukwazi, never neglects the international scene. News about township life is interwoven with news about Palestine. The reading mentioned earlier by the Palestinian American poet in Khayelitsha is the type of news event that Ground Up considers legitimate, because it offers a glimpse of township life and of the global scene. An August 22, 2013 Ground Up posting by Jonathan Dockney, a member of OSS, describes the event OSS hosted to feature the book Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 2000–2010 and its author, Shaul. Our Harsh Logic demonstrates that the Israeli Defence Force’s role in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is only minimally to defend the state of Israel. Dockney notes that Shaul describes the dominant function of the Defence Force as “more about offense and entrenching the occupation.”44 Approximately forty people attended the event, and many more watched a live stream of it. Earlier, in March 2013, Ground Up posted a statement by Doron Isaacs, mentioned previously, during IAW, Isaacs, who got his start as an activist in Habonim, a progressive Jewish youth organization, and who today is the head of the organization Equal Education, emphasizes the degree to which Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is even more egregious than the laws of the apartheid regime. He writes: “Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank live under two completely separate legal systems. A Palestinian and an Israeli who commit the same crime on the same day will be charged and treated as if they were living on opposite ends of the world. The Israeli will be charged under Israeli civil law, and be subject to the protections of a modern legal system. The Palestinian will be subject to military law. The whims of military law govern every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank.”45 Isaacs’s history as a member of Habonim leads him to champion equal participation by all citizens of a democracy and access to the tools that are required for every citizen to articulate rights and demand transparency from their government. In March 2012, Achmat spoke at the University of Cape Town during the IAW’s Palestine Solidarity Forum. In his speech, titled “Why I Believe That Israel Is an Apartheid State,” he recalls his earlier reluctance to use the term “apartheid” with reference to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. But, he says, he can no longer avoid the term, having made several trips between 2008 and 2011 to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and having spoken with Israeli Jewish and Palestinian activists there. Achmat says, “Nothing that I had read could prepare me for the existential horror of the Palestinian people (Christian and Muslim) I experienced on

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New England Journal of Public Policy a Breaking the Silence tour of Al-Khalil/Hebron.”46 He goes on to make a systematic comparison of apartheid laws of South Africa with current Israeli laws and practices against Palestinians. Among other prominent South Africans (including the former deputy defense minister and anti-apartheid activist Madlala-Routledge) who have made a trip to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories is Edwin Cameron, a judge on the Supreme Court of Appeal. He observed to his hosts on the trip: “We came here lacking in knowledge and are thirsty to know. We are shocked by what we have seen until now. It is very clear to us that the situation here is intolerable.”47 He stresses that the trip was undertaken to enhance knowledge, to fill the gaps in the information available to him and other South Africans of the experience of Palestinians under Israeli Occupation. Cameron, like Achmat, became a major voice in the fight against the South African government’s inaction on AIDS. In 1999, while serving on South Africa’s High Court (a position to which he had been appointed by President Mandela in 1994), Cameron publicly disclosed that he was “living with AIDS.” He fully recognized the economic privilege that allowed him to receive medications and therefore keep his status hidden. In his statement of disclosure, he stresses his privileged situation and calls for the creation of conditions in South Africa that will allow those less privileged than he to live openly with HIV.48 Justice Cameron invested his professional visibility and intellectual energy in excoriating the government of South Africa, specifically President Thabo Mbeki, for its policy of AIDS denialism. The refusal to recognize proven facts and overwhelming available evidence is unconscionable, Cameron says, and he declares that it is unthinkable that a leader and his government should irrationally ignore irrefutable science. 49 Cameron’s deep commitment, professionally and personally to accumulating necessary information in order to take a stand suggests that he made the trip to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories to ascertain for himself the conditions of Palestinian life. Despite the extensive list of organizations and individuals who have committed to the support of Palestinian rights and to the international BDS campaign, one should not assume that their activities and their positions have gone unopposed. Opposition has been fierce. The South African Zionist Federation, as mentioned earlier, has been vocal in its criticism of the campaign by OSS protesting the retailing of Ahava products by Wellness Warehouse. The federation has also “deplored” the 2012 decision by South Africa’s trade minister, Rob Davies, to require the relabeling of all products from Israel that are manufactured in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The statement from the Jewish leadership reads: “The South African Jewish community is outraged over Cabinet’s decision approving the Minister of Trade and Industry’s notice requiring that goods emanating from what it refers to as ‘Israeli occupied territories’ be relabeled. In acting in so cavalier a manner, government has not only bypassed the consultation process set in motion by the notice but shown itself to be completely dismissive of Jewish concerns.”50 Perhaps the most contentious and problematic confrontation between members of the South African Jewish community (many of whom were strong participants in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and 1980s) and BDS activists took place in August 2013 at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University) during a concert by an Israeli jazz quartet. The concert was hosted by Wits to compensate for the aborted concert in March 2013, during IAW, at which BDS supporters heckled and interrupted the performance. At the August concert, several BDS supporters, protesting the appearance of the jazz quartet at Wits, sang a song that included highly inflammatory words that drew the ire of many for being grossly and

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New England Journal of Public Policy outrageously anti-Semitic. The BDS activist Muhammed Desai explained the use of the words within the context of apartheid and downplayed (disingenuously, many would argue) their significance saying that “many African people in South Africa—when using the word ‘Jews’— meant it in the same way they would have during the eighties: ‘Just like you would say kill the Boer at [a] funeral during the eighties it wasn’t about killing white people, it was used as a way of identifying with the apartheid regime.’” But his explanation “appalled” many within the BDS movement, who called for an unconditional apology for the use of the phrase. Nathan Geffen and Doron Isaacs, Jewish South Africans who are staunch BDS activists and who are connected with OSS, were unrelenting in their criticism: “We support BDS South Africa's right to protest but the behavior of the protesters and Desai’s subsequent comments simply cannot be justified. We call on BDS South Africa to issue an unequivocal apology and to commit to stamping this out.”51 (In this context, the January 26, 2015 declaration by BDS South Africa about support for Holocaust Memorial Day is worth noting.)52 Adam Habib, vice chancellor of Wits and himself a supporter of BDS, was deeply troubled by the protest and by the song. Habib was involved, while he was at Johannesburg University, in canceling the water-purification collaboration with Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. Firmly committed to freedom of expression, he invited the quartet in August. This controversy, with all its unsavory and deeply problematic rhetoric, reveals fraught, ongoing, and divisive public debate within a citizenry who are acutely conscious of their activist heritage and their obligations to their own democracy and the self-determination of others elsewhere. Even at the highest levels of the judicial system, debate and discussion about Palestine is encouraged. Such commitment to enabling a public conversation about the practices of the state of Israel and their impact on Palestinians has no parallel elsewhere in the global community. In August 2014, several activists initiated a campaign demanding that Woolworths stores in South Africa withdraw Israeli products from their shelves. Woolworths in South Africa is a large retail and supermarket chain; the activists disrupted consumer activity in the stores by staging “‘die- ins’ (where they lie on store floors screaming, or feigning death), till jamming (where they hold up till points with trolleys full of goods they then refuse to pay for), placing or distributing placards or pamphlets inside Woolworths stores, and generally protesting inside the shops or preventing customers from entering.”53 Woolworths took the matter to the Johannesburg High Court. The court affirmed the right of Woolworths to conduct business uninterrupted but ordered Woolworths to sit down and talk with the protestors, whose continual calls for such a dialogue had gone unheeded by the Woolworths management. Both sides portray the court’s ruling as a victory. The BDS activist Kwara Kekana said, “‘Woolworths arrogantly insisted for the last four months that they ‘cannot see what a meeting would achieve.’ . . . This court order affirms BDS SA’s stance and we [are] looking forward to meeting with the management of Woolworths to make our case for why Woolworths should terminate its trade relations with Israel.”54

Pro-Palestine Activism as a Revisiting of South African History With regard to South Africans’ revisiting the moments of their own history and struggles against apartheid, it is useful to consider Dobrota Pucherova’s analysis of three early- twenty-first- century South African novels in which the protagonists seek out connections with foreign “others.” Pucherova sees these efforts as a way for South Africans to reanimate their own idealism of a “rainbow nation.” (This ideal was shattered when, in May 2008, angry and unemployed South Africans turned violently against immigrants from other parts of Africa, such

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New England Journal of Public Policy as Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, and Somalia, and destroyed their homes. In April 2015, a similar outburst of anti-immigrant violence occurred in the cities of Durban and Johannesburg.) Though all three novels were written before the 2008 violence against immigrants, they explore the recuperative value of love and friendship for the unfamiliar “other,” the foreigner whom you would expel. Pucherova argues that the protagonists in these novels “seek redemption, renewal and redefinition of South African identity through an identification with the foreign other.”55 In Ishtiyak Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (published in 2005), the protagonist, Katinka, is a radical Afrikaner who rejects the narrow vision of her ethnic group. She extends her love to Karim, a Palestinian and “an ultimate other removed behind the multiple barriers of language, religion, ethnicity, nationality, and the West Bank Wall.” Katinka gives up her life to be with Karim, learn Arabic, and live with the constraints created by the Israeli separation wall. “Her voluntary imprisonment in the city of Qalqilyah behind ‘the Wall,’” Pucherova observes, “is an act of self- substituting responsibility for those condemned to powerlessness and invisibility, and an act of friendship.”56 It seems fitting to end with a reference to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whom many consider to be the ethical compass of the nation, especially at a time when the activities of the ANC-led government seem so reprehensible, and former freedom fighters fail to live up to their commitment to the people. Tutu was criticized for his insistence during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings of 1996–98 that all violence—that perpetrated by the agents of apartheid and that by the anti-apartheid freedom fighters—be treated in the same manner. The violence of freedom fighters could not be viewed as more morally just than the violence of the apartheid state, he averred, in his position as chair of the commission. He has declared his distaste for the activities of Jacob Zuma, current president of South Africa, and for the venal policies of the ANC. In 2012, the Tampa Bay Times published a statement by Tutu in which he responds to a letter written by twelve hundred rabbis in the United States urging Christians not to support divestment efforts against Israel. Tutu says: I am aware that many of our Jewish brothers and sisters who were so instrumental in the fight against South African apartheid are not yet ready to reckon with the apartheid nature of Israel and its current government. And I am enormously concerned that raising this issue will cause heartache to some in the Jewish community with whom I have worked closely and successfully for decades. But I cannot ignore the Palestinian suffering I have witnessed, nor the voices of those courageous Jews troubled by Israel's discriminatory course.57 Recalling Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which King expresses his disappointment with the white moderate who would settle for a “negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice,” Tutu observes that King’s sentiment and “words describe almost precisely the shortcomings of the 1,200 rabbis who are not joining the brave Palestinians, Jews and internationals in isolated West Bank communities to protest nonviolently against Israel's theft of Palestinian land to build illegal, Jewish-only settlements and the separation wall.” It is hard to predict to what extent the trajectory of the international anti-apartheid movement will find its echo in the BDS campaign against the state of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians. Because the anti-apartheid campaign took twenty years of concerted effort to yield its objective, it seems likely that it will take at least until 2025 for BDS campaigners to realize significant gains. When and if that happens, South Africa’s BDS and Palestinian-rights efforts will be seen as having played a central role. Whether or not one agrees with Omar Barghouti that

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Palestinians’ South Africa moment has arrived, it is important to remember that the beneficiaries of pro-Palestinian activism in South Africa are not the Palestinians alone. This commitment to being on the frontlines of global activism for Palestine is, for many South Africans, a necessary step in the journey toward national self-restoration.

Notes

1 “The Cape Town Declaration,” Media Review Network, February 8, 2014, http://mediareviewnet.com/2014/02/the- cape-town-declaration/http://mediareviewnet.com/2014/02/the-cape-town-declaration/. 2 In 1990, Nelson Mandela, following his release from prison, visited New York, where he was interviewed by Ted Koppel at a town hall meeting on the news program Nightline. He is unequivocal in his support for Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization and for the Palestinian people. For the relevant sections of the interview, see Nora Barrows-Friedman, “Nelson Mandela in New York, 1990,” The Electronic Intifada (blog), December 13, 2013, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/hear-nelson-mandela-discuss-support-palestine- 1990-interview#Nelson%20Mandela%201990. For Mandela’s famous 1997 assertion, see “Address by President Nelson Mandela at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” December 4, 1997, African National Congress, http://anc.org.za/show.php?id=3384. 3 South African activist Martin Jansen quoted in Sarah Lazare, “South African Activists Reflect on Parallels between Life under Apartheid and Israel/Palestine Today,” Mondoweiss, November 21, 2014, http://mondoweiss.net/2014/11/activists-apartheid-israelpalestine. Other activists interviewed in the article are Salim Vally and Alexandria Hotz. See also Amandla!, August–September 2014, a special issue featuring “BDS Israel.” Amandla! is a South African magazine started in 2007 that “stand[s] for social justice.” 4 “‘Israel Is Free to Trade with SA’—DTI,” Mail and Guardian, August 6, 2014, http://mg.co.za/article/2014-08-06- dti-no-plans-to-impose-trade-restrictions-on-israel. 5 For the full text of the Palestinian civil society’s BDS call, see “Palestinian Call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS),” Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, July 9, 2005, http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=66. 6 Alu Abunimah, at a Q & A session following his talk at the University of Massachusetts Boston, April 1, 2014. 7 For a discussion of the role of US grassroots’ anti-apartheid activism in the gradual overturning of government resistance to sanctions against the apartheid regime, see Audie Klotz, “Norms Reconstituting Interests: Global Racial Equality and U.S. Sanctions against South Africa,” International Organization 9, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 451– 78. 8 Alex Kane, “Influential Jewish Group Pushes New York Bill Aimed at Israel Boycott,” Mondoweiss, February 11, 2014, http://mondoweiss.net/2014/02/influential-israel-boycott.html; Ali Abunimah, “Anti-Boycott Measure Slipped into Maryland State Budget,” The Electronic Intifada (blog), April 1, 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali- abunimah/anti-boycott-measure-slipped-maryland-state-budget; Ali Abunimah, “New US Bill to Punish Academic Boycott Inspired by Israeli Ambassador,” The Electronic Intifada (blog), February 7, 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/new-us-bill-punish-academic-boycott-inspired-israeli-ambassador “Action Needed: Illinois Legislature Set to Address Academic Boycotts of Israel,” JUF News, March 28, 2014, http://www.juf.org/news/local.aspx?id=426951. 9 “Pension Fund TIAA-CREF Declines to Vote for Israel Boycott,” The Algemeiner, May 30, 2013, http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/05/30/pension-fund-tiaa-cref-declines-to-vote-for-israel-boycott/. See also “TIAA-CREF Drops Sodastream,” August 22, 2013, press release, https://wedivest.org/post/288/press-release-tiaa- cref-drops-sodastream#.U0qSpKUahuY. 10 Julia Wong, “Oakland Activists ‘Block the Boat’ for Three Days Running,” In These Times, August 20, 2014, http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17106/oakland_activists_block_the_boat_for_three_days. See also Block the Boat for Gaza’s Face Book page, accessed January 30, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/events/1447374682195857/. See Barbara Harvey, “A BDS Movement that Works,” Solidarity, November/December, 2012, http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/3720, for the status of campaigns against Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Veolia.

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11 Several panels at the November 2014 American Studies Association conference and the January 2015 Modern Languages Association conference featured the issues of the Palestinian peoples and the illegal practices of the state of Israel. And both organizations have committed to continuing the discussion in an express refutation of efforts to silence such conversation. Bill Mullen notes that “since 2013, resolutions to boycott Israeli universities have been passed by the Association of [sic] Asian American Studies, the ASA, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the Association for Humanist Sociology, and the African Literature Association.” Mullen, “Palestine, BDS, and the Battle against US Imperialism,” International Socialist Review, no. 95 (Winter 2014–15), http://isreview.org/issue/95/palestine-bds-and-battle-against-us-imperialism. Mullen’s article offers a useful overview of the impact of BDS in the United States. 12 Omar Barghouti, “Our South Africa Moment Has Arrived,” Palestine Chronicle March 18, 2009, http://palestinechronicle.com/old/view_article_details.php?id=14921. See also Kim Bullimore, “Palestinians Speak on Growing Boycott of Israel,” Direct Action, no. 29 (February, 2011), http://directaction.org.au/issue29/palestinians_speak_on_growing_boycott_of_israel. Bullimore notes that in South Africa and Israel, there have been important escalations of BDS since 2010 in response to the disproportionate retaliatory assault by Israel on Gaza in Operation Cast Lead. Bullimore quotes Barghouti as saying, “the developments in South Africa . . . have been phenomenal.” 13 Noura Erakat, “What Comes Next? A Forum on the End of the Two-State Paradigm,” Jaddaliya, November 12, 2013, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/15082/co-editors-mouin-rabbani-and-noura-erakat-and-o.i.n. 14 David Grossman quotes Shehadeh on his decision to stay in Palestine in his Yellow Wind (New York: Picador, 2002), 145. 15 Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (New York: Scribner, 2008), xviii, 2. See also Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin: A Novel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). Mohammad Al-Azza’s documentary film Everyday Nakba (2011) offers an important view into the deprivations of water that Palestinians in the Aida refugee camp endure every day. 16 David Lloyd made this statement at the Modern Languages Association (MLA) conference in Vancouver, January 9, 2015 at a roundtable organized by the Radical Caucus of the MLA. 17 Journal of Academic Freedom 4 (2013), http://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/journal-academic- freedom/volume-4-2013/editors-introduction-volume-4, is devoted to the question of the academic boycott of Israel. In April 2013, the Association for Asian American Studies became the first academic organization in the United States to approve a resolution for boycotting academic institutions in Israel. More recently, at the November 21–24, 2013 conference of the American Studies Association, a resolution calling for the academic boycott of Israel was discussed extensively. Several essays and Op Ed pieces followed. These include David Palumbo-Liu, “Boycotts, Academic Freedom, History,” Truthout, November 26, 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/20262- boycotts-academic-freedom-history; David Lloyd, “The Taboo on Boycotting Israel Has Been Broken,” The Electronic Intifada , November 26, 2013, http://electronicintifada.net/content/taboo-boycotting-israel-has-been- broken/12949; and Alex Lubin, “Breaking ‘America’s Last Taboo,’” Middle East Research and Information Project, November 27, 2013, http://www.merip.org/breaking-“america’s-last-taboo.” Inside Higher Ed ran a news story November 25, 2013 by Elizabeth Redden, “American Studies and Israel,” https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/11/25/american-studies-association-meeting-scholars-debate-proposed- academic-boycott. 18 Adri Nieuwhof, “South African Activist: ‘Palestine Casts Light on Our Own History,’” The Electronic Intifada (blog), December 5, 2011, http://electronicintifada.net/content/south-african-activist-palestine-casts-light-our-own- history/10658. 19 “Renowned Palestinian Poet Performs in Khayelitsha,” GroundUp, September 30, 2013, http://groundup.org.za/content/renowned-palestinian-poet-performs-khayelitsha. 20 Facebook page of Israeli Apartheid Week 2014, posted March 8, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/notes/596949407050150/. 21 Nora Barrows-Friedman, “South African Students Endorse Nationwide Boycott against Israel,” The Electronic Intifada (blog), August 5, 2011, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora/south-african-students-endorse-nationwide- boycott-against-israel.

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22 For COSATU activism, see Glen Adler and Eddie Webster, eds., Trade Unions and Democratization in South Africa 1985–1997 (New York, St. Martin’s, 2000); Vishnu Padayachee, review of Trade Unions, ed. Adler and Webster, International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 59 (Spring 2001): 133–35; Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa 1983–1991 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001); Roger Southall, review of UDF by Seekings, Journal of Modern African Studies 40, no. 1 (March 2002): 174–77 (though Southall praises Seekings, in the main, he faults Seekings for downplaying the activist role of COSATU); Stephen Zunes, “The Role of Non-Violent Action in the Downfall of Apartheid,” Journal of Modern African Studies 37, no. 1 (I999): 137–69. For material on SACC activism, see Anthony Balcomb, “From Apartheid to the New Dispensation: Evangelicals and the Democratization of South Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 34, nos. 1–2 (February–May 2004): 5–38; and Tracy Kuperus, “Building Democracy: An Examination of Religious Associations in South Africa and Zimbabwe,” Journal of Modern African Studies 37, no. 4 (1999): 643–68. 23 Recognizing that they enjoyed privilege as a white minority and fearful of being seen as resistant to the apartheid system, the majority of Jews in South Africa silently and passively accepted the status quo. Many, however, joined the South African Communist Party and the ANC in protest against apartheid; Joe Slovo, the general secretary of the SACP and the leader of the armed wing of the ANC, was a prominent Jewish activist in the anti-apartheid struggle. Albie Sachs, who was appointed to the Constitutional Court of South Africa by President Mandela, suffered serious and extensive injuries for his participation in the anti-apartheid struggle. The extant scholarship on Jewish resistance to apartheid concludes that those who were visible in the resistance to apartheid made the majority of the Jewish community uneasy. See Mark Israel and Simon Adams, “‘That Spells Trouble’: Jews and the Communist Party of South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 26, no. 1 (March 2000): 145–62; Oren Baruch Stier, “South Africa's Jewish Complex,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 10, no.3 (Spring–Summer 2004): 123–42; and Peter Beinart, “The Jews of South Africa,” Transition, no. 71 (1996): 60–79. See also Shula Marks’s excellent review essay “Apartheid and the Jewish Question,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 4 (December 2004): 889– 900. Marks writes a fine analysis of two works: Milton Shain and Richard Mendelsohn, eds., Memories, Realities, and Dreams. Aspects of the South African Jewish Experience (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2002); and Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Hanover, MA: University Press of New England, 2003). 24 “Join the 11th International Israeli Apartheid Week (2–8) March 2015,” BDS South Africa, http://ymlp.com/zL9xsU. 25 For information about the CLSJ, see “About: The Centre for Law and Social Justice,” Writing Rights (blog), accessed May 9, 2015, http://writingrights.nu.org.za/about-2/. 26 The passages quoted here are part of the preamble of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the full text of which can be found at http://www.writingrights.org/2007/09/07/african-charter-on-human-and-peoples- rights/, last modified September 7, 2007. 27 “Vision,” Palestine Solidarity Alliance, accessed October 21, 2013, http://www.palestinesa.co.za/about.html. 28 For the SACC’s full statement to its membership, see “IAW: A letter from the SA Council of Churches to all Churches in SA,” BDS Movement, posted February 24, 2012, http://www.bdsmovement.net/2012/iaw-a-letter-from- the-sa-council-of-churches-to-all-churches-in-sa-8720. 29 “Over 150 Former International Anti-Apartheid Activists Tell South Africa’s ANC to Boycott Israel,” The Electronic Intifada (blog), October 27, 2012, reprint of press release by Muhammed Desai of BDS South Africa, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/over-150-former-international-anti-apartheid-activists-tell-south- africas-anc. 30 In 2009, the ANC condemned Desmond Tutu’s criticism of the party and of its president, Jacob Zuma (who at the time had not yet become president of South Africa), as “sacrilege.” Tutu said that he did not relish having Zuma become president of the country, and he chastised the ANC for its arrogant ways. “ANC Condemns Tutu’s ‘Sacrilege,’” BBC News, April 2, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7979952.stm. The activist Zackie Achmat is another prominent voice who said in 2012 that he would leave the ANC if it re-elected Jacob Zuma for a second term as its leader. “Choose Zuma and I’ll Leave the ANC, Says Achmat,” Mail and Guardian, November 19, 2012, http://mg.co.za/article/2012-11-28-choose-zuma-and-ill-leave-anc-says-tac-leader-achmat. 31 On several visits to South Africa, beginning in January 2006, I heard complaints against the ANC from South Africans of all races and all socioeconomic strata. For discussions of South Africa’s market-driven priorities and neo-liberal economic agenda from the inception of the new democratic nation, see David Lazar, “Competing Economic Ideologies in South Africa’s Economic Debate,” British Journal of Sociology, 47, no. 4 (December 1996):

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599–626; Charles Mather and Stephen Greenberg, “Market Liberalisation in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Restructuring of Citrus Exports after ‘Deregulation,’” Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 2 (June 2003): 393–412; Padraig O’Malley, “Challenging the Neo-Liberal Agenda in South Africa,” The Heart of Hope: South Africa’s Transition from Apartheid to Democracy, accessed October 21, 2013, http://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv02424/04lv02730/05lv03005/06lv03006/07lv03096/08 lv03102.htm; and Geoffrey E. Schneider, “Neo-liberalism and Economic Justice in South Africa: Revisiting the Debate on Economic Apartheid,” Review of Social Economy 61, no. 1 (2003): 23–50. 32 Donald Culverson, “The Politics of the Anti-apartheid Movement in the United States 1969–1986,” Political Science Quarterly 111, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 127–49. See also Culverson, Contesting Apartheid: U.S. Activism, 1960–1987 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999). 33 “South African Human Rights Group Responds to Zionist Federation Criticism of Ahava Boycott,” Mondoweiss, September 14, 2010, http://mondoweiss.net/2010/09/south-african-human-rights-group-responds-to-zionist- federation-criticism-of-ahava-boycott.html. 34 The quotations from OSS in this paragraph were available on the OSS website http://openshuhadastreet.org/about/ November 27, 2013. This site can no longer be accessed. But the information that was on the original website was available May 9, 2015 on two other websites: “Open Shadada Street South Africa,” Givengain, http://www.givengain.com/cause/4471/, and Australian Jewish Democratic Society (AJDS), http://www.ajds.org.au/35/. See also the OSS Facebook page, accessed May 9, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/OpenShuhadaStreetSouthAfrica?fref=nf. For a discussion of asymmetrical power, see Giorgo Gallo and Arturo Marzano, “The Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflicts: The Israel-Palestine Case,” Journal of Conflict Studies 29 (2009): 33–49. See also Rabah Halabi, ed., Israeli and Palestinian Identities in Dialogue, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 35 “No Israeli Goods: Victory for Worker Solidarity,” Palestine Chronicle, February 6, 2009, http://palestinechronicle.com/old/view_article_details.php?id=14793. 36 Jeremy Gordin, “South Africa Student Group Declares Israel Boycott,” Haaretz, September 7, 2012, http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/south-africa-student-group-declares-israel-boycott- 1.463415. See also Aislinn Laing, “South African University Severs Ties with Israel,” The Telegraph, March 24, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/8404451/South-African- university-severs-ties-with-Israel.html. For Israel’s violation of the water and land rights of Bedouin Palestinians who live in the Negev (or the Naqab), where Ben-Gurion University is located, see Monica Tarazi, “Planning Apartheid in the Naqab,” Middle East Report, no. 253 (Winter 2009): 32–36. See also Jillian Kestler-D’Amours, “Israel: No Place for Bedouin,” Al Jazeera, June 29, 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/06/20116238174269364.html. Adalah, Suggested Issues for Adoption of List of Issues Prior to Reporting, report to the UN Human Rights Committee, June 11, 2012, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrc/docs/ngos/Adalah_Israel_HRC105.pdf. Two of the ten issues address the destruction of Bedouin villages: “the demolition and evacuation of unrecognized Arab Bedouin villages” and “the lack of access to water in unrecognized Arab Bedouin villages.” 37 Jonathan Hyslop, Salim Vally, and Shireen Hassim, “The South African Boycott Experience,” Academe 92, no. 5 (September–October 2006): 66. 38 The use of the term “apartheid” to characterize Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians has been widely debated. See, for example, Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid State (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1987); Ian Urbina, “The Analogy to Apartheid,” Middle East Report, no. 223 (Summer 2002): 64; Oren Yiftachel, “Neither Two States nor One: The Disengagement and ‘Creeping Apartheid’ in Israel/Palestine,” Arab World Geographer 8, no. 3 (2005): 125–29. Yiftachel writes: “a hierarchy of rights is gradually institutionalized and legalized based on ethnicity and location. This order is ‘creeping’ because it has never been openly declared, nor endorsed by any political movement. In a game of deception, all actors turn a blind eye and continue to support the illusion of impending peace. This order is also ‘creeping’ because Jews continue to settle in the West Bank, the illegal wall is still being constructed, and the treatment of some groups among Israel’s Palestinian citizens increasingly resembles the fate of their brethren in the Occupied Territories” (128). See also Yiftachel, “‘Creeping Apartheid’ in Israel- Palestine,” Middle East Report, no. 253 (Winter 2009): 37; Raef Zreik, “Palestine, Apartheid, and the Rights Discourse,” Journal of Palestine Studies 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 68–80. Zreik argues: “Apartheid” is not an accurate term, because, “at the heart of apartheid lies the concept of exclusion. But in order to exclude something, or to think of it as excluded, it is necessary first to imagine the possibility of inclusion. One cannot think of French

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people as being excluded from the right to vote in the U.S. presidential elections, because their inclusion was never envisaged. On the other hand, one might have conceived of blacks in the nineteenth century United States as having been excluded, because there was a totality (the American people) of which they were presumably a part, but from which they were in fact excluded.” Speaking of the Palestinian refugees after the Nakba, Zreik argues also that Israel “spared itself the necessity of imposing a classical Apartheid regime within its borders through the mechanism of expulsion” (72). Zreik concedes that the situation of the Palestinians in the West Bank resembles apartheid, and Israel has succeeded in keeping the Palestinians physically and conceptually outside of its “imagined political community.” See also Leila Farsakh, “Independence, Cantons, or Bantustans: Whither the Palestinian State?,” Middle East Journal 59, no. 2 (2005): 230–45; and Farsakh, “The One-State Solution and the Israeli Palestinian Conflict: Palestinian Challenges and Prospects,” Middle East Journal 65, no. 1 (2011): 55–71. 39 I have borrowed the term “Israelification” from Andrew Bacevich, who writes of the “Israelification” of US policy in Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed their Soldiers and Their Country (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 2013). 40 Robin D. G. Kelley and Erica Lorraine Williams, “Madiba in Palestine,” Counterpunch, December 10, 2013, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/10/madiba-in-palestine/. 41 Achmat’s statement appears on the Ndifuna Ukwazi website, accessed May 8, 2015, http://archive- za.com/page/1871953/2013-04-15/http://renu.nu.org.za/. In the context of knowledge as a foundation for self- determination, Edward Said writes: “The present is our battleground and knowledge is our main weapon.” Said, “Memory, Inequality, and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights,” Alif, no. 24 (2004): 33. 42 Samantha Power, “The AIDS Rebel,” New Yorker, May 19, 2003, 54–67. 43 Mark Heywood, “South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign: Combining Law and Social Mobilization to Realize the Right to Health,” Journal of Human Rights Practice 1, no. 1 (March 2009): 14–36. Heywood writes: “Treatment literacy is not taught in a neutral or bio-medical fashion. Information about the science of medicine and health is linked to political science, human rights, equality, and the positive duties on the state” (18). Such education shows each individual how she or he is situated within a network of national and global forces; it helps these individuals understand how legal challenges to the extraordinarily high prices set by the multinational big pharma on life-saving drugs paired with actions of and civil disobedience to force their own government to live up to its obligations help create the conditions in which their urgent medical needs can be addressed. 44 Jonathan Dockney, “Israel’s Harsh Logic in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” GroundUp, August 22, 2013, http://groundup.org.za/content/israel’s-harsh-logic-occupied-palestinian-territories. 45 Doron Isaacs, “Apartheid: South Africa’s History, Palestine’s Reality?” GroundUp, March 15, 2013, http://groundup.org.za/content/apartheid-south-africas-history-palestines-reality. 46 Zackie Achmat’s speech is posted on Ayman Qwaider, Palestine Is the Anvil of Our Souls (blog), accessed November 27, 2013, http://aymanqwaider.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/why-i-believe-israel-is-an-apartheid-state- zackie-achmat/. 47 Edwin Cameron quoted in Gideon Levy, “Twilight Zone / ‘Worse than Apartheid,’” Haaretz, July 10, 2008, http://www.haaretz.com/twilight-zone-worse-than-apartheid-1.249503. 48 Edwin Cameron, Witness to AIDS (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 61–63. 49 Ibid., 103–23. 50 “South Africa Requires ‘Made in West Bank’ Label,” Jewish Daily Forward, August 22, 2012, http://forward.com/articles/161486/s-africa-requires-made-in-west-bank-label/. 51 Muhammed Desai quoted in Verashni Pillay, “‘Shoot the Jew’ song slammed,” Mail and Guardian, September 2, 2013, http://mg.co.za/article/2013-09-02-shoot-the-jew-song-slammed. 52 Congress of South African Trade Unions, “Palestine Group BDS SA Commemorates Holocaust Day,” press release, January 26, 2015, http://allafrica.com/stories/201501271447.html. 53 “Court puts hold on anti-Woolworths protests,” SABC News, November 25, 2014, http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/bbadf08046559bbebf43ff226832f392/Court-puts-hold-on-anti-Woolworths-protests- 20142511. 54 Kwara Kekana quoted in “Pro-Palestinian Activists Banned from Protesting in Woolworths Stores, the High Court in Johannesburg Ruled on Tuesday,” Times Live, November 25, 2014, http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2014/11/25/pro-palestine-activists-bds-banned-from-protesting-in-woolworths- stores. 55 Dobrota Pucherova, “Re-Imagining the Other: The Politics of Friendship in Three Twenty-First Century South

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African Novels,” Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 4 (December 2009): 930. 56 Shukri, Silent Minaret, quoted in ibid., 942. 57 Desmond Tutu, “Justice Requires Action to Stop Subjugation of Palestinians,” Tampa Bay Times, April 30, 2012, http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/justice-requires-action-to-stop-subjugation-of-palestinians/1227722.

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